Window Of Opportunity

More than 30 years after narrowly surviving a wartime nightmare in Vietnam, Alan Vu is now living the American Dream.

Today, he is a successful entrepreneur, owner of a business he hatched in the basement of his Westbrook home and built to a size that allowed him to leave his secure job in information technology at Aetna.

His wood trim products now sell in Lowe’s home improvement stores locally and in Home Depot stores in the Boston area, and he is in talks to sign a regional contract with True Value.

Few rags-to-riches success stories begin as dramatically.

The year was 1975, and Vu was a 21-year-old pilot in the South Vietnamese army. On the last day of the Vietnam War, as his military base was under attack, he grabbed one of the last flights to the United States. He didn’t have a penny to his name, and he never even got a chance to tell his family he was leaving.

“There was no reservation about leaving. We just really reacted to the crowd,” Vu said. “We were able to hop on the airplane without any thinking. We all had to run for cover. It was really basic human instinct for survival.”

With nothing more than the flight suit he was wearing and some Vietnamese currency in his pockets, Vu and one of his army friends headed to Alabama, where they stayed with a family he had met a couple of years earlier while he was in a U.S. training program for South Vietnamese army pilots.

Vu and his friend lived and worked different jobs in Alabama for two years before moving to Washington, D.C. to look for other work opportunities.

Just two years later, another friend of Vu’s was able to get jobs for both of them at Aetna, so he moved to Connecticut to work as a computer programmer for the company. He stayed with the company for almost 30 years, serving in various positions while also earning a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Hartford in 1984.

A few years ago, Vu got an idea for a home-improvement product while finishing the basement in his house. He was trying to install wooden trim around a door, measuring and cutting the wood to form a perfect square corner. He became frustrated by how long the process took him.

“I’ve always had a carpentry hobby,” Vu said. “I figure if I had the problem, many people have to have the same problem.”

And so the 10 Minute Trim was born.

While still working at Aetna, he formed his own company, Old Saybrook Doors in Glastonbury, which makes pre-mitered and pre-measured wooden trims for doors and windows. The pieces, designed to standard window and door measurements, fit together through mortise and tenon corner joints to form a 90-degree angle. 

“The customer doesn’t deal with raw materials and they don’t have to worry about measuring,” Vu said. “Something that would take a good carpenter about 30 minutes, they can do in 10.”

At a time when the housing market is slumping, people are doing what they can to make their homes as attractive as possible, said Sherry Rifkin, chairman of the Greater Hartford Association of Realtors.

“The less work people have to do when they purchase the house, the happier they are because they’re able to finance a bigger part of the picture without having to invest money later,” Rifkin said.

Vu started his company about five years ago. In just the past two years, the 10 Minute Trim has made its way into home-improvement retail stores. Since windows and doors generally come in standard sizes, Vu said the 10 Minute Trim will work for most projects.

Vu declined to provide his company’s annual revenues or to say how many people it now employs.

Even though he is approaching retirement age, Vu said he could not consider passing up the chance to start his own company. “Seeing the lack of opportunity in Vietnam and knowing what this country has to offer, I had to do it,” he said.

Vu has been able to return to his home country several times since he fled, and his mother has since moved to the United States. He still keeps in touch with the friend who came to the country with him, though he now lives in California. Given all that he’s been through, Vu said he has taken nothing for granted. “It’s been a journey,” he said. “There are lots of opportunities here, and I’ve taken them.”